Browsers are probably the most used app on the computer. I have never seen a person that does not have one cause today browsing the internet is the primary use of a computer. So what browser to use? Well every normie I know will just answer: “Use Google Chrome!” and it baffles me. There are tons of great browsers out there, and you choose Google Chrome? Due to Google’s aggressive advertising Google Chrome was able to climb on top and dominate the browser game for years now. In the past however, believe it or not, but it was Internet Explorer (IE) that was the dominant browser until Microsoft got sued for antitrust in 1998. This “browser monopoly” is quite dangerous as it gives the owner of the browser which in this case would be google, the ability to single-handedly control the entire internet. Everything from standards to even available websites, which google has tried on many occasions. Recently they have been trying to push a new extension platform called (MV3) which most likely would kill off the adblockers or limit them. Manifest v3 has been introduced in the development version of chrome and I assume that as soon as they finish polishing it, they will introduce it into the main branch to then in a few years make it the only working extention platform. Of course, google “ensures” that the alleged death of the adblockers won’t happen however how much can we trust a greedy ad company that directly makes money from showing you their ads in their browser? In addition, it is widely known that Google Chrome is basically Google’s spyware. Google tracks every website you visit, every item you purchase, everything you type and more that we don’t know as Google Chrome is proprietary. Don’t believe me? Well maybe this may convince you to believe me.

Well let’s say that like me, you do not want to be the google’s cattle so you look for other browsers. If that is you then you are in luck as I have used many browsers in my life and I know my thing when it comes to software. So here is a list of browsers that I know of and have used with my opinion on them. In additon, I will go over a few good habits and extentions that may make your life easier, safer and more private. Before I can grade them however, I should mention what I look for in a browser. Keep in mind that I am a poweruser therefore if you are looking for the typical normie features like big gui buttons or rating of the convinence features like syncing between devices then you may be dissapointed. However I am sure that browsers I will showcase here will be user-friendly enough for people with no technical knowledge or who simply don’t want to put in effort into learing how to use a new browser. Here is a list of what is important to me:

• Security - Is the browser secure? Won’t it get compromised?
• Speed - Is it fast enough? Some browsers load a lot of bloat that nobody needs which can make it slower
• Privacy - Does it not send all of my data to chinese servers? Does my browser profile me?
• Functionality - Self-explanatory. If it lacks things I need then why use it?
• Extensibility - Are the extentions I need supported?
• Transparency - Can I somehow verify whenever the browser does not have any mallicous code in it? The browsers have been devided into 4 categories:
• Spyware - basically it’s like downloading a virus on your computer. Overall they have a better alternative that do not spy on you or are not insecure.
• Usable - those browsers are not as bad as the previous category however still they have better alternatives.
• The best - these are the browsers that are the best ones you can find. They offer the best features and in additon are safe and private
• Meme/novelty browsers - they are browsers with a cool concept. They work for very basic web browsing, but lack enough features to make it good enough for daily use. If you need something for imageboards or browsing simple webpages

Spyware tier⌗

Google Chrome⌗

Well I think I have said enough alredy so let me just summarise all of the issues. Google Chrome is a google’s fork of Chromium browser that integrates a lot featues from other services made by google. It is closed source licenced under google’s custom licence. Due to google’s nature the browser is filled with a lot of telemetry and straight up malicous featues like alleged spying in incognito tabs. A lot of google service features are actually not exclusive to google chrome as they can be added in different ways like adding Google translate features via extentions or copy. In fact, a lot of features that google says is exclusive to Google chrome, is actually just excusive to chromium in general which covers a wide range of browsers today or straight up is just a restricton based on useragent to make it appear as other browsers are just unable to do something because of it’s inferiority when if the user applies a different useragent using extentions, the feature works like a charm. It can be seen when you attepmt to copy or paste in google docs while using firefox. In additon despite what google may try to claim, due to a lot of garbage code added by google, It may be the slowest chromium-based browser in existance. Overall, Google Chrome is a slow awful spyware browser that’s appeal is based on strawman features that can be implemented in many other ways.

Opera and Opera GX⌗

Opera and Opera GX are 2 different browsers however since they are made by the same company and most likely share the majority of the code except the ui and few features which may look pretty useful. Opera is a chromium-based browser made by the Opera company, licenced under EULA. Opera markets itself as a privacy browser due to its features like built in-vpn. It also incorporates a cool new UI like side pop-out tabs and. In OperaGX you also get access to many limiters like network, cpu and ram limiters to make your browser use less resources while gaming and features like Workspaces or website integration. Let’s start of with the first claim which is privacy. Well if not the fact that the browser is proprietary does not speak for itself then let’s look at their Vpn that they market as the heart of the privacy in their browser. Vpn integrated into opera is free for every user that downloads opera which is free. The question is how does opera keep this vpn alive if it’s free? Well with your data of course. They sure my claim that your data is safe and private, but what is really stopping them from selling it? What is happening is they take the traffic that would normally god through your isp’s network and route it via their own network. There is no real gain in privacy meanwhile your internet speeds will be slower due to the way vpns work. In additon vpns don’t really protect your privacy. Their other features are not that amazing either. Ui can be mostly customized via extensions, Limiters can be applied at os level, floating windows are in every browser and can replaced with mpv or other software. Speed is not great either as the browser is bloated with many features that again, can be implemented in other ways. Overall, Opera is again, an awful browser that tries to destinguish itself with strawman featues. Oh, have I mentioned that Opera browser has been sold to a Chinese consortium? Well I was not joking when I said Chinese spyware.

Microsoft Edge⌗

Microsoft edge is a chromium based browser made by Microsoft. It is closed source, licened under EULA. Edge is a kinda weird browser to me. It basically works as a Ms’ chromium with all of the syncing features and integrations of their services. That is why it comes as the preinstalled browser on every windows 10 install. It also comes with settings that make you belive that edge is a privacy - respecting browser. It gives you 3 options: Basic, Balanced and Strict with Balanced selected as the default option

There are few more similar features. This sounds pretty good until you scroll a little lower and see the big statment about diagnostic data.

Hmm, “required data”? Do you really require it? Well if this is not spooky enough then just look at the optional diagnostics. They literally tell you that you can allow Microsoft to read your browsing history and other. Now they claim its “optional” but due to the browser being closed source we can’t verify what that button does. Does it work? Does it disable anything? Only Ms knows. If they wanted to they could just make this option turned on by defalut, make it reset to enabled on update or straight up remove it one day due to how the eula you accept works. In additon the features they provide are kinda lacking as tests like Panopataclick report that browser is still easly trackable even with strict settings on. Well of course it can be fixed with plugins, but what is even the point when no plugin can block built-in Microsoft botnet. Well privacy is (as with every Microsoft product) just a smoke screen to cover the real tracking that is going on under the hood. Security-wise there is not much going on compared to chromium. This is the case with every browser in this category as all of them are chromium so they tend to have the defalut settings on all of them. This browser seems to have some modificaton done to it like having WebGL2 disabled or having some “experimental antitracking methods” enabled. Besides that, it is the same as every browser in this category. Speed-wise there is not much that is different compared to Opera or Google Chrome tho it is not bad as the other. Overall, Microsoft Edge is just yet another big company Chromium fork that does not distinguish itself much from something like Google Chrome, sharing similar features as Chromium but associated with a different company

Before you ask: Yes I skipped safari. I do not have a mac and I do not care about apple sofware. Overall I refuse anything that is made as apple when it comes to software and hardware (frameworks and engines like webkit is ok tho)

Usable tier⌗

Firefox⌗

Firefox is a browser made my mozzila. It uses it’s own engine called Gecko and licenced under MPL-2.0 permissive licence. Firefox is a pretty good browser and perhaps the only big alternative to google’s chromium. This fact alone is great news as 90% of browsers we use are chromium based. As long as firefox is alive, there is some kind of competitor to chromium’s (google’s) monopoly. When it comes to usage, firefox does not differ much from a standard chromium browser, except a few quirks that make this browser truly a privacy respecting and secure browser. Firefox’s most impressive and perhaps best feature is great customizability allows you to really take control of your browser.

You can have way more control over whatever you feel like. This may sound like nothing useful to a normie that only cares if the browser working but for people that value priacy and security it allows you to turn off features that could be a security risk or make you trackable like canvas, supercookies, webrtc, clipboard-events and much more. If you want to configure your fox to its highest potential then go to ffprofile and go thorugh the configuration. To double down on privacy mozzila also created “containers” which function as diffrent profiles of your browser that you can set on tabs. This feature is awesome as you can basically sandbox each website to it’s category like ebay to shopping and linkedin to work among other. You may ask then, what are browser profiles? Well those are separate configurations of a browser that do not share anything between each other. This all in addition of a huge repository of extensions at mozzila store that compares to what is available on chromium store. After all of the praise that I have given to firefox it seems weird that I rank it so low however there is a reason. Mozzila which owns firefox is kind of a weird company. While they claim to champion free internet they also seem to to really hate it. This and many other examples as their hypocrites can be found here. Simply put, I cannot trust them to keep this browser away from what companies like google do casue not only they seem to be infested with sjws and pander to those types of people in effort to gain a user base. Just to add salt to wounds the company is funded by google, which means that google still has some control. Also of course mozzila implemented a lot of normie features that just bloat it up and don’t provide anything useful to a poweruser like pocket or account syncing. Next major thing that firefox’s configuration out of the box is simply awful compared to many forks. You claim privacy yet you got google as the search engine and telemetry enabled on stock configuration? What? I could go on with mozzila’s issues but I think we had enough. Overall, firefox is a great browser with many great features but due to the poor management from mozilla’s side it became kind of weird abomination. Happly there are forks to fix mozilla’s issues.

Vialdi⌗

Vivaldi is Chromium-based browser developed by the Vivaldi Technologies which itself is a company started by an ex-CEO and cofounder of Opera software, the original creators of the opera browser. Despite the fact that the browser is licenced under EULA, the sourcecode is available to anybody. This means that the browser’s source code can be seen, read and perhaps contributed to but cannot be freely taken, modified and redistributed. Now, because of the fact that the creator is an ex CEO of Opera, you may correcty assume that both projects will share a lot between each other. Vivaldi has most if not all of the opera features plus some own.You got all of the tab previews, side bars, kitchen sink, etc. I’ll be honest if you are a feature junkie then this browser may be great for your usecase. In my case it has a same issue as opera: those features do not provide much utility to me so they are irrelevant. Privacy and security wise this browser is just OK. Sourcecode can be inspected and seached for any issues or trackers put into the code. However, the licence prevents you from taking the sourcecode and developing it in a way to ensure it is tracker free even if Vivaldi has a change of heart and decides to add some nasty telemetry. Speaking of telemetry, In the Vivaldi’s privacy policy they state that:

When you install Vivaldi browser (“Vivaldi”), each installation profile is assigned a unique user ID that is stored on your computer. Vivaldi will send a message using HTTPS directly to our servers located in Iceland every 24 hours containing this ID, version, cpu architecture, screen resolution and time since last message. We anonymize the IP address of Vivaldi users by removing the last octet of the IP address from your Vivaldi client then we store the resolved approximate location after using a local geoip lookup. The purpose of this collection is to determine the total number of active users and their geographical distribution. (…)

Your browsing history such as visited URLs, typed search keywords and downloaded content are stored in your client profile and only accessible by your own action. Vivaldi AS has no access to this data. Your history cannot be shared unless it is by your own action. (…)

Well sure this sounds reasonable (not really) until you read privacy policy for “Vivaldi sync function”

The data is encrypted, sent to Vivaldi servers located in Iceland by the user’s Vivaldi browser in the form of individually encrypted entries for each separate data item. Similarly, the user’s Vivaldi browser can request to retrieve the data from the server and decrypt it using the user’s key. Vivaldi servers also send a notification to any logged in Vivaldi Browser over an encrypted connection.

Alongside that data, we store some metadata that allows us to ensure the integrity of the stored data. This metadata includes: the user to which each encrypted entry belongs; the datetime at which the user started using sync; the datetime of the user’s last connection to sync; some encryption information; the type of each entry (whether it is a bookmark, a password, a tab, etc); whether the entry was deleted (deletions are synced); the parent of the entry (for tree structures, like bookmarks); the identifier of the client on which the entry was created; and the times at which the entry was created and last modified.

In addition to this, we keep track of error logs emitted by the server software whenever an unexpected state (error) occurs. These logs contain a user name, a timestamp and other non-sensitive data. They are kept for up to 30 days. (…)

Vivaldi has strict restrictions on access to user data. Only a limited number of Vivaldi’s employees or employees at Vivaldi’s service providers for the web hosting services have access to such data.

Vivaldi will not transfer any personal data to third parties except as required by law or law enforcement. Vivaldi’s servers are hosted at the Hringdu data centers in Iceland.

Oh wow would you look at that. The earlier mentioned data which was supposed to be kept private is actually inspectable by glowies and employees. Who would have expected! If you use this browser, just make sure to stay away from sync and turn off all telemetry. Anyways, Vivaldi is a great browser for people that like Opera and wish to switch from it due to it’s privacy issues. Sure it’s weird licence leaves a lot of ifs in the equation but I’d go for it any day over Opera.

Chromium⌗

Plain old chromium. Not much can be said here since I already have spoken about Google Chrome and chromium is pretty much the same, but a little bit better when it comes privacy, because of it being open source and having less blobs. It is also slightly lighter cause it does not phone home every 5 minutes. Nonetheless, it still includes much of the google pozz as Google Chrome. The default settings are horendous, with google set as the default browser, no ad blocking, fingerprinting protection, or other, but this is a google product, so that is expected. You of course, got all of the extentions and themes that are avilable on Chrome web store.

This is just an ok browser. It retains enough user-friendly features from google chrome to keep the normies happy, while being less intriusive overall. I not trust it though. Best use of this browser is as a drop-in replacement for google chrome if we really need most of the chrome features<\p>